Maybe for the first time ever, we’re seeing some real price competition affecting the largest ISPs. The big ISPs have seen competition in some markets for the last decade, but in many markets, competition really seems to be making a difference.

Fierce Network recently quoted Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong as saying that he is seeing irrationally low prices from some fiber overbuilders who are selling gigabit broadband for as little as $30 – $40 per month. He says that it costs Comcast as much as several thousand dollar to convert an HFC customer to fiber, and that he can’t understand the rationale behind selling fiber broadband that cheaply.

He still said in the same article that he doesn’t think that customers will leave Comcast broadband to switch to FWA cellular wireless. I’m a bit mystified by that statement. The three FWA carriers have been adding a million new customers per quarter to FWA, and those customers have to come from somewhere. Ookla noted in a recent article that 70% o FWA customers are in urban and suburban areas, and it’s hard to believe that a lot of those customers aren’t coming from a cable company. I think FWA is succeeding in urban areas because of price. A customer that bundles FWA wireless with a cell plan can buy home broadband for as little as $35 per month. In today’s tight economic times when people are getting price conscious about everything, that seems like a significant savings for a household. FWA speeds aren’t terrible and customers within a mile of a cell tower can routinely see download speeds between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps, and faster in some markets.

Competition is also forcing marketing moves by other big ISPs. Verizon recently announced that it is going to bundle fiber home broadband with cellular service on a single bill. I bought FiOS fiber from Verizon in 2007 and I have been wondering since then why the company didn’t bundle the two services. At that time, I had AT&T cellular, and I would have considered changing to Verizon if they had offered me an incentive – but no offer ever came.

I understood in 2007 why Verizon didn’t offer a bundle. Verizon was structured in distinct product silos, and the fiber FiOS, the copper DSL, and cellular businesses each operated separately. When Verizon launched fiber FiOS it didn’t even buy voice from the legacy telco and installed its own new softswitches. It’s taken the company twenty years to finally decide that bundling could be beneficial for customers and the bottom line. For the last five years, Comcast has been doing well bundling broadband and cellular in Verizon markets, and its still taken this long for the Verizon to fight back with its own bundle. One thing I tell clients you can always count on with the big telcos is that they are the exact opposite of nimble. Perhaps that’s starting to change a little.

It’s also possible that the day will come when satellite joins the competitive fray. Starlink is not a serious threat in urban areas today because of a capacity issue and the number of customers it can handle in a given area. Starlink speeds are also slower than the other urban technologies. But this might change when Starlink launched enough next-generation V3 satellites to improve speeds and capacity. And nobody knows what’s going to happen to the satellite market when Amazon LEO finally joins the fray. If Amazon decides to compete on price, it will put a lot of pressure on Starlink to match – and there are urban customers who might be willing to buy satellite broadband if the price differential isn’t a lot. There are already some urban folks buying Starlink because of its mobility. I know several people who buy Starlink so they can take their broadband along with their camper, and they use it as home broadband when they are back home.

Five years ago I predicted that broadband would routinely be priced at $100 or more, and there are noncompetitive markets today where that is the price. But there are a whole lot of markets now, where prices are a lot lower than that. Of course, none of the big companies price strictly by market any more – they price by customer and neighborhood, so what we’re really likely to see are competitive and non-competitive neighborhoods in cities, with my bet that the low-income neighborhoods will be paying the most for broadband.